A Phoenix First Must Burn

by A Phoenix First Must Burn (retail) (epub)

  The chicken coop sat to the left, and even their rooster wasn’t up yet. Rows of fields stretched out as far as Etta could see, always reminding her of the beautiful cornrows Mama would braid into her hair, but these would bloom with melons and cabbage and potatoes instead of zigzagging curls. The slaughterhouse and smokehouse lurked to the right like twin shadows. And the Big House where Ms. Mildred and Granddaddy lived sat out in the distance, the white porch wrapping around its front like a perfect ribbon and the little oil lamps in the windows illuminated like eyes gazing out into the dark.

  Dew coated their ankles, and the warmth of the day started to heat up their skin.

  Etta walked as fast as she could with Mama toting her like a basket ready to spill its contents.

  “We’re almost there,” Mama whispered.

  “How far does Madame Peaks live?” Etta asked.

  “She doesn’t live close by or far away.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  At the edge of their land, Mama gave Etta a tiny bottle containing her heart fragments, set her against one of the magnolias to rest, then took out a little shovel and dug up one of its roots. She used a knife to sliver off three pieces. Etta heard her thank the tree.

  “What are you doing?” Etta craned to see.

  “Building a conjure door. Madame Peaks left this town—this world—when I was a young girl. But I always knew how to find her.” Mama pulled a letter from her pocket. “Now, once you go through, hurry on up to her house. You’ll see it. There’s no getting lost.” Mama got to work unpacking ingredients from her satchel and setting them on the ground.

  Etta nodded.

  Mama read the letter aloud. “Three magnolia roots to create the frame. A pinch of saltpeter to awaken them. A spoonful of cayenne to charge the conjure. A bowl of salt to purify the door. A cup of brick dust to protect the traveler. And a drop of the traveler’s blood.”

  Before Etta could react, Mama had pierced the knife into the flesh of her fingertip and taken blood.

  Mama scrambled back as a tiny fire popped and crackled in the heap. The air filled with a creaky, stretching sound. The roots grew into long braids, twisting and twirling until they were the length of long ropes. They coiled together into a wreath, gathering all of the ingredients from the pile like careful hands, then bloomed into a large trellis bursting with crimson flowers.

  Etta’s eyes grew wide with wonder as a doorknob appeared within it.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Etta hobbled through the entry. She turned back to face her mama.

  “You coming?” she asked, reaching back.

  Mama shook her head no. “You’ve got to do it alone. But I’ll be waiting for you right here. Go straight to the house. Don’t wander. Don’t be curious.”

  Etta gulped, but quickly the pain in her heart reminded her to move. Across a long thicket of grass sat a house, and it hung over a cliff like a tiny lip. She thought that one day the house might catch too much wind and tip over, tumbling down onto the rocks. The old lady’s treasure scattered like bones to be picked clean by vultures looking for nest objects.

  A bottletree twinkled in the morning light. The blue glasses caught sunrays and any evil thing that might wander this far into her yard.

  Her mama had a tree like this, tucked inside the garden so Ms. Mildred wouldn’t see it, and Etta remembered the night they’d put it up, the summer she’d turned nine. An ivory moon had overwhelmed the sky, its glow washing the plants with light. Mama had lined up a series of glass bottles of every color, shape, and size on the grass. They’d danced around the tree, tying the bottles to boughs and branches.

  Etta approached the house with caution. Staring at the porch and how it wrapped around the house like a crooked smile. Bulbous red globes dangled in the big front window. Through the glass one could see shelves upon shelves of glass containers full of unrecognizable things. A tattered sign dropped like a spider above the doorway and in faded cursive lettering announced: MADAME EMMA PEAKS’S CURIOSITIES AND ROOTS.

  Mama’s money felt like a ball of fire in Etta’s pocket. She’d given her several bills. She didn’t know how much it cost to repair a heart.

  Would it be fifty dollars?

  A hundred?

  More?

  Etta was afraid, but her heart couldn’t beat any faster. She took a deep breath and walked up the staircase. It wheezed and whined and announced her presence. Before Etta could raise her hand to knock, the door crept open.

  “Come in, child,” a voice called. “I’ve been expecting you all day.”

  Etta stepped inside the parlor. Clear jars revealed diseased bits of human viscera: pus-coated eyeballs, carbuncled flesh, gangrenous toes and fingers, spotted livers, lesion-covered kidneys, ribbons of blood vessels. The skulls of small animals paraded along an oak desk. Tonics and remedies, tinctures and salves, syrups and balms were featured for sale. A mortar and pestle and a bundle of brass surgical tools caught the red glint of the globes in the window, morphing them into demonic instruments.

  The bones of a skeleton were stitched together with brass pins; a marionette flung across a chair, strings tangled, arms and legs sprawled out every which way.

  A chandelier of half-burned candles sparked with flames as Etta walked beneath it.

  “Where are you, Madame Peaks?” Etta called out.

  “In the back. Come.”

  Etta followed the voice. A hallway stretched before her, winding narrowly like a dark river. Pockets of gloom and dead air lurked about, while candlelight quivered in splotches along the floor, sprouting into sturdy, infrequent stripes.

  Etta pushed open the kitchen door. The woman slumped over a sink, her spindly back curved into a question mark as she rinsed herbs. “Have a seat, child. Be gentle with yourself. I can feel your fragile heart.”

  Etta slid into the nearest chair at her table. “How?”

  “That’s for me to know.” She turned around and stared at Etta with foggy eyes. She wore a heaping pile of black fabric. Her brown skin held deep folds. When she walked toward Etta, her cane scratched across the floor like sharp-nailed claws.

  “Can you fix my heart?” Etta handed her the tiny perfume bottle, then reached into her pocket and revealed the crumpled bills.

  She took the money from Etta’s palm. “I can do you one better. I can either fix it or give you a new heart.”

  “A new heart?”

  “Yes. You got to decide whether you want me to grow yours back or if you want to select another.”

  “You have that kind of thing here?”

  “I have everything I need, and yes, that means hearts, child. Let me show you.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  When they were thirteen years old, Etta and Jackson found a conjure map in his parents’ basement. It was tucked away in a hatbox and up on a shelf, and Etta never knew how he’d found it all the way up there.

  They spread it across the floor, brown foreheads slick with sweat as they gazed over a map of the constellations littered with red lines that Etta felt sure were blood. Their baby pictures sat tucked into opposite corners, and pen marks revealed their full names, birth time, weight, and other numbers neither of them could decode.

  “What does this all mean?” Jackson asked, his nose crinkled with curiosity. She loved the way he bit his lip when he focused and how his head cocked to the left.

  “Didn’t your mama tell you?” Etta asked. “We supposed to be together forever.”

  “Forever is a long time. What if you leave our town? You said you wanted to travel once we graduated high school.”

  “You can come with me.” She couldn’t imagine doing anything without him. They were inseparable.

  Jackson loved Etta, and Etta loved Jackson. That’s how it went.

&nbs
p; “And leave them to work the farm? I couldn’t do that.”

  “It wouldn’t be forever. We’d come back. Don’t you want to see what’s out there? Aren’t you tired of Blue Hill?”

  “No.” He dropped his gaze back to the map, and they didn’t say another word to each other that day.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Before you decide, I’ll show you the hearts. Follow me, child.” Madame Peaks led Etta down a set of staircases into a cellar. “It’s been so long since someone has come needing a heart. I’ve got quite the collection as of late.” She shuffled forward, and reached for something in the dark. A candelabra illuminated in her hands. “Come, let me present you with a few to consider.”

  The walls were covered in glass sarcophaguses, each boasting a heart.

  Etta’s eyes widened. “Where did you get all of these?”

  “They were traded or collected.”

  Etta didn’t know what that meant, but she was sure afraid to ask questions.

  “I’ll present a few of my suggestions.” Madame Peaks stopped before the third one on the left. “The iron heart. Shiny, bright, still malleable in case you change your mind about love later in life—or the universe presents you with someone worthy. Doesn’t rust.” She shuffled forward to the fifth one. “The amethyst. A semiprecious stone and variety of quartz. Will protect you against your heart feeling intoxicated by love.”

  Etta marveled at how this heart twinkled in the light, shades of purple glittering almost like a trapped star.

  Her mind became a tangle of indecision. She didn’t know how she could ever choose another one.

  But before she could even think through the first two, Madame Peaks held the light up in front of two others.

  “This one is my personal favorite. The gold heart. Took me many years to acquire,” she mused. “It’s definitely too soft for a person so young, and I’d need to work on it to increase its strength. But it sure is a beauty.” She tapped too-long nails on the sarcophagus, then stepped forward to one final glass coffin. “Lastly, a thorned metal heart. I bargained for this one. The ridges should provide ample protection. They open and close when attacked.”

  Etta grabbed her chest.

  Madame Peaks took her hand. “It’s time to choose, child.”

  “How could I possibly?”

  “You ain’t got no choice. You can have any of the hearts here. I’d probably pick the amethyst one. Saw your eyes get big as coins. Or I can regrow the one dying in your chest.”

  “Will it hurt if you fix the one I have?”

  “It’s never easy. I suppose like love itself. But if I do, you’ll have to relive the relationship—the high and the low, the sweet and the sour, the light and the dark. It’s what conjure requires.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “You spending too much time running around here with that boy,” Ms. Mildred told Etta right after she turned sixteen. “You haven’t made a single diorama this month. This year even. You promised me one.”

  Etta was undoing the plaits in her hair and preparing to go meet Jackson. He’d said he had a surprise for her, but he was never good at hiding things. Not from her. She’d seen him whittling wood and collecting light bulbs, and she couldn’t resist. She’d sneaked over to the woodworking shed he shared with his daddy to see what he was up to. And it was the greatest thing: he’d made her a life-size diorama of a traditional Japanese teahouse. “We’re in love,” she replied to Ms. Mildred, bracing herself for one of her grandmother’s bites. “And we’ve been busy. Too busy for me to make those silly dioramas anymore.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Jackson.”

  “So much we and not enough I, Cookie. You hardheaded.” She sucked her teeth. “And he’s a wanderer who doesn’t want to see nothing. The dangerous type. You’ll be in trouble soon. Mark my words.”

  “No, I won’t. I’ll just be in love,” Etta replied.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “You better hurry up.” Madame Peaks sniffed Etta once they got back upstairs. “Sage and amber.”

  “What?”

  “You smell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When a soul is being taken, this scent, your scent, is released. Calling death. The body is a discarded, charred building left behind once the soul is gone.” She bent forward over Etta with an ancient-looking stethoscope, pressing it to Etta’s chest. She closed her wrinkled eyes as she listened to the slow chug of Etta’s heart. The tiny flutters sent a buzzy lightness through Etta; any moment now she’d drift away like a feather.

  “It’s winding down, turning to dust, girl.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You know the options. First, regrow the heart you got. Second, choose one of mine from the cellar. Third, find your beloved again.”

  “But I can’t. It’s over. He doesn’t want me anymore. I lost him.”

  “Women don’t lose men. There’s nothing you could’ve done. Men leave women for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it’s too hot outside. Other times, their bellies ache. It could be too windy that day. It’s when women tether their hearts only to the whims of men that they turn to ash.”

  “My mama said you cast our stars.”

  “I did. But the universe has other plans.”

  “What will happen to him? Will his heart die, too?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He got something else coming his way. Don’t you worry. You won’t suffer all the consequences. But for now, focus on yourself and stop worrying about him. You’ve got to grow your own tree.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “How much will regrowing a heart cost?” Etta asked.

  “Everything you have, child.” Madame Peaks led Etta to the chaise in her living room. Etta laid across it. Madame Peaks lit incense. Clouds of smoke drifted up and around her head. Flies paused on the windowsill, brown moths froze flat against the windowpane, cinder and smoke rose through the old floorboards like wisps of steam, candle flames stretched into long bars of light.

  Mirrors fogged. Liquid boiled in the jars. The walls erupted in flames. Madame Peaks took deep breaths over Etta. “Ashes cannot be remade into flesh.”

  “But won’t I die?”

  “Your old heart will, but your soul will wait for the new one to bloom.”

  “How?”

  “The roots always provide.”

  Etta was too weak to protest or be afraid.

  “But you must promise me something, child.”

  “Yes,” Etta replied.

  “Never give your heart to another.”

  Etta thought of Ms. Mildred. “So I can never fall in love again?”

  “No. You can, but hearts are your own to keep. They’re to keep you alive. Give your affection. Give your love. Give your time, but nothing so vital to your own survival. Be careful with giving away parts of yourself before you understand them fully. You’re free of the stars now, so choose wisely in the future. After you know yourself. Love is not supposed to poison your own well.”

  Etta nodded.

  Madame Peaks hunched over Etta, her breathing turned into a hissing wind. Papers scattered everywhere, glass jars crashed onto the ground, the red globes in the window wobbled, threatening to drop.

  Red dust poured out of Etta’s nose and mouth and swirled. Madame Peaks opened the tiny perfume bottle and its contents joined the rest.

  The ash hovered above her like a thunderous cloud ready to expel lightning.

  Her chest felt empty and hollow.

  “Open your mouth, child, quick.”

  Etta let her neck drop back and opened her lips like a baby bird ready to receive whatever the woman had. She placed a blue-petaled chicory flower on Etta’s
tongue.

  “Swallow it whole,” Madame Peaks directed.

  A warmth burst through Etta’s chest, and the tiny pulse of a heart drummed.

  “You rest now. The new heart will take a day to grow. I’ll watch over you.”

  Etta’s eyelids closed at Madame Peaks’s command, and she muttered a promise to her—and to herself: “I’ll never give my heart away again.”

  “Rest, child. The cycle of light and dark will begin. You will remember your favorite moment with your beloved and your worst moment. The only way to the light is through the dark.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “I will never be able to not remember the way you look,” Jackson told her the first time they’d taken all their clothes off in front of each other.

  “Is that a good thing?” Etta had asked; a deep blush rushed through her like she’d been electrocuted.

  “You are someone I will never be able to forget. A melody I can never erase,” he whispered in her ear.

  She ran her fingers over his brown chest, tracing the lines of his muscles, then letting them tangle in the soft curls that covered his skin. His hands found the curves of her body, leaving their warmth.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “It’s just not working,” Jackson had whispered. His bare legs hung over the side of Etta’s bed. The moon had just started to rise outside the window behind him. He wasn’t even supposed to be in her room. Mama didn’t like company upstairs. But Etta always broke the rules for him.

  “What do you mean?” Etta arched her back. “We’ve had the best days together. That big diorama you made me was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. Did I not tell you that enough?”